


from clay and back again

by moonbeatblues



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: M/M, i need this before i finish consecuted au, i'm SORRY i need this, this technically is in accordance but it's. a separate look at it. please believe me i dream this au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:47:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23713849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: You haven’t been home in a long time. Clarabelle runs from the house to greet you, holding the tatters of the hat you’d given her all those years ago onto her head.“Caduceus,” she says, breathless, “what brings you home?” and then the smile slides off her face.—“Caduceus.”“Yes, Fjord?”“Does the Dynasty still exist?”“What?”(stone and clay, before and after consecution)
Relationships: Caduceus Clay & Clarabelle Clay, Caduceus Clay/Fjord
Comments: 2
Kudos: 51





	from clay and back again

**Author's Note:**

> do these even exist in the same timeline?? i truly don't know, this au is like an electron cloud

You bury your husband where he’d asked you to, just behind the house.

(“I’ll be back,” he tells you, cradles your face in his shaking hands. “If the Mother permits it. I'll come back to you.”

You smile, because you don’t want to say that you’re not sure if she will.)

You haven’t been home in a long time. Clarabelle runs from the house to greet you, holding the tatters of the hat you’d given her all those years ago onto her head.

“Caduceus,” she says, breathless, “what brings you home?” and then the smile slides off her face.

(The Mother gives you gentle repose early in your career. It’s a simple spell, just keeps decay from the body for a short time. It predates revival magic, she tells you, was a way to allow proper burial rites to be made, long before mages’ heads swelled stubbornly with the idea that there need not be a funeral at all. That they were better than the earth calling them home.

You use it twice. Once, before you are married, and once after.)

Behind you the horse snorts and shakes, rattling the lead.

(“I want to bring him home properly,” you say. Caleb pauses in flipping through his older books— there’s a pedantic streak in all of you. For Transmutary Incumbent Caleb Widogast, it shows in his refusal to copy his spells over until the binding splits from his first spellbooks, and maybe not even then.

“It’s a dangerous road,” he says. “We buried someone on it already.”

You laugh. “Yes, well. I want to visit him, too.”

“Are you angry with him?”

“For what?” You already know, but Caleb’s words will show whether there is more to wait for in the next century.

“For choosing to return. For not wanting to leave.”

Ah. So he has done it, too.

“No,” you say, because Caleb is not just asking after Fjord. “The earth is patient. She waits until someone has decided to stay.”

“Would you? Return?”

Another laugh works up in your throat, but it’s twisted and wrong.

“I have time.”

—

A horse, a pall is a small task for a Chain of Tharizdun. A larger task is declining the offered parade.

You take your husband’s body home in almost perfect silence. The horse chews its bit, the wheels of the pall rattle stones. It’s a cicada year.

The grave on Glory Run is in full bloom. You stop to gather a bundle of flowers, pale pink and purple and red, and carefully pull aside the layer of crawling vines to see that despite everything, the coat remains.

“Would you choose the same, if you knew what you carried? Were you in there when it shattered?”

_Are you already back? Will I get to meet you after all?_

The sway of the infant grove in the summer breeze is no answer, but you weren’t truly expecting one. Below the earth, fungal fibers wrap the bones of Mollymauk Tealeaf like a chrysalis. Awaiting a transformation that will never come, because the home is empty, the light is out.

What a beautiful thing.)

The earth makes no qualms about who is laid where, but the Clay family still has a special plot for itself.

You watch Calliope dig from the window. Fjord is laid out in the burial room, still wrapped in the comforter you’d brought him home in.

“Are you staying?” Clarabelle asks.

“Yes,” you say. “Once I bring the last one home. This is where they’ll know to find me. You can leave then, I’ll look after the house, and Mom and Dad.”

“I—” She was the only one to ask you beforehand, the first time. Not that you knew how to say anything other than that you’d be okay, but it stuck with you nonetheless.

“It’s different than the first time. I’ve seen the world, and I want to be home. You deserve the chance to decide.”

She leans against you in the kitchen, in front of the window overlooking the backyard. Calliope wipes sweat from her brow, and turns to look at the two of you, leaning on her shovel.

“Thanks, Caduceus.”

* * *

“Caduceus.”

“Hmm?”

He’s washing vegetables in the sink.

“What are we going to do?”

Caduceus doesn’t look up.

“Well, I was planning on sautéing these. Finally grew some nice saffron this year, haven’t done that in a while. Should be a good dinner.”

“After that.”

He keeps washing the vegetables.

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to remember you. everything that happened. I want to know.”

“Wouldn’t you rather just be here, together, again? Isn’t it enough that you’re you again, and I’m still me, and we’re all here?”

“Beau had to teach me how to spell my name.”

Caduceus turns off the sink. His hands, full of tubers, hang in the sink from limp arms. He doesn’t turn around.

“Caduceus.”

“Yes, Fjord?”

“Does the Dynasty still exist?”

“What?”

“No, really. Is the Dynasty still there?”

He says nothing.

“Who’s the current ruler of the Empire?”

He still doesn’t turn around, just places the tubers quietly on a towel and uses another to dry his hands.

“Does the Empire exist?”

“I don’t know.”

“When did you stop leaving? How long after?”

“A hundred years.”

The sad, fuzzy sort of anger falls out of him, like a tangible thing.

“I—”

“It’s okay. We didn’t know how it would work.” He laughs, shakes his arms until the sleeves roll back and pushes hair out of his face, still that washed-out ice pink. “I knew I’d outlive all of you, I just didn’t know how many times. I didn’t know if I should wait. I didn’t— if you weren’t coming back, I wanted to know your graves were alright. I didn’t know what to do.”

“So you did both. You waited, and then you didn’t.”

“Do you think I should do it?”

He doesn’t ask what.

“Do you want to?”

Caduceus laughs again. He’s never been good at sarcasm, but the little rumble and shake to his shoulders isn’t such a happy thing.

“I don’t know what I want anymore.”

Fjord moves, then, steps beyond the invisible barrier between foyer and kitchen. It’s funny, to be as tall as Caduceus.

He reaches for the knife block, takes out the big rectangular one.

“Well, saffron first.”

A smile jumps at the corner of his mouth and falls again. “And then?”

“And then we can talk to the others.”

“Fjord?”

He starts cutting, dull sounds, like a slow rattle of metal against wood. Disks of carrot fall neatly— it’s funny, to be a cook this time. To have learned before they met. “Yes?”

“Is the Dynasty still there?”

He pauses. “I don’t know. Trick question, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“I think Caleb knows.”

“Okay.”

Caduceus gathers a handful of saffron, trailing rusty-red strands, and places them on the long cutting board. he grabs another knife, smaller.

“Remember when Calliope made this for us? The board?”

He closes his eyes. 

“No.”

Caduceus doesn’t move. He drinks in the posture of him, the tension in his shoulders. He thinks one thing, and says a different one instead: “When was that?”

Caduceus blinks.

“It was after five years. We came back to say hello, and said we’d keep it here for when we decided to stay.”

“Did we use it much?”

“Sometimes. Holiday dinners, mostly, and then later. You wanted to be at home, then. So I did, too. It's funny, how much I carried just this to travel sometimes, and some folks live their whole lives never even seeing a teleportation circle."

Caduceus starts to chop the saffron smaller and Fjord listens to his breathing even out again, still chopping carrot.

“Fjord?”

“Yeah?”

“Is the Empire still there?”

He smiles. 

“No.”

**Author's Note:**

> i'm @seafleece on tumblr, come say hello!!


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